Getmontessori.com is an extension of @montessorieducation on instagram. We started that page in late 2016 with the hope of inspiring others with our Montessori exploits. This blog also hopes to accomplish that same mission by sharing our thoughts and resources in a long-form manner

Montessori Education

Apr 28

Apr 28 Computer Based Number and Alphabet Activities

As of late, our daughter has shown significant interest in our computer. Daddy is always on his laptop for work, and she sees him manipulating spreadsheets constantly. She has done a great job in learning letters and learning numbers, so she recognizes what he is doing and thinks it looks like a fun game.

So, he put her in his lap and created the perfect, yet simple alphabet activities and number activities for a toddler in preschool age. Oh and did we mention it is totally free!?

We love this fun toddler game too for a myriad of reasons, the first of which is it is entertaining to her, while being a very educational activity. It also creates very early familiarity with a keyboard and increases her computer literacy, which in this day and age is VERY important.

What he does is open up a Google Sheet (<click to open) and create 30 green boxes in a single column. He also likes to put borders around all 30 boxes so they are more defined. Like this:

After he does that, he gives a prompt next to the very first cell, so she knows what she is doing. Like so:

In this case, he is having her start at the number one and count up to 30 by finding the right numbers on the keyboard, pressing them and hitting enter to move down to the next cell. She can reference the number above and count to help her along. When finished, it looks like this:

SO EASY! But, it is so entertaining to her. We have been doing this for around 4 weeks and she can do the whole thing by herself, even backspace when she accidentally presses a number too many times or gets one wrong. He is now using conditional formatting in the spreadsheet to change the color of the cell when she gets it right as a visual confirmation. This allows her to work independently.

We are also doing to the same thing with the alphabet. Except with the ABCs you only need 26 green boxes.

This is new age Montessori Education. It screams practical life while developing math and number skills and allows for complete independence. It is ideal for preschool homeschooling and If your child is a bit older this can easily be modified into a computer learning game for kindergarten by increasing how high they count, or by having them copy an example word in an adjacent cell. We love this fun toddler game and have seen fantastic progress in the few weeks we have been working it into our curriculum.